FREE Essay on Our Solar System and the Planet Saturn.
Of all the planets in our Solar System, you'd have to agree that Saturn is the most immediately recognizable. With its iconic rings, you can pick Saturn out in an instant, but if NASA scientists.
This essay is notionally about W. G. Sebald's discursive, essayistic novels, especially The Rings of Saturn, but then Patrick wanders off and talks about the nature of the essay itself, the nature of creative nonfiction, the fictional aspects of nonfiction and the nonfictional aspects of fiction, and the way he likes to write his own essays (maybe a dozen different topics---you count).
The Appearance of the Rings The rings of Saturn consist of a sheet-like distribution of icy particles, most about the size and composition of snowballs, orbiting Saturn in individual almost exactly circular orbits, at various distances from the planet. All of the particles are well inside a region defined by the Roche Limit, within which the gravity of Saturn tends to tear apart large objects.
Saturn's most striking feature is its ring system, which consists of countless chunks of ice the size of dust particles to pieces as big as 10 meters. The space between chunks is large enough that probes have crossed through them with no damage. There are seven major rings, with the largest being 180,000 miles across, and countless smaller ringlets, some of which are held in place by shepherd.
The Rings of Saturn Quotes Showing 1-30 of 33 “But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years.
One leading theory is that the rings are the remnants of one or several moons that once orbited Saturn. It is possible that a moon could have been torn apart by a combination of Saturn’s gravity and the influence of other moons, causing its debris to be scattered around the planet in a ring. The rings may also have formed, or perhaps been added to, by passing comets and asteroids being.
Saturn's Rings: 07.22.04 In pictures, Saturn's rings look a lot like the solar system's largest parking lot - a wide, flat surface almost as wide as the distance between the Earth and Moon. That's a lot of empty parking spaces. Why not just park a spacecraft there to study Saturn and its moons? Image to right: Saturn's rings only look solid. They are actually masses of debris forced by gravity.